Your Firm Cookbook: Why and How
Does your firm document its processes and procedures? Having a firm “cookbook” has many advantages, from on-boarding new team members to identifying opportunities for improvement. Documentation can help with business continuity and succession planning. Many firms may have a Standard Operating Procedures manual, but is it easy to find and update? A three ring binder back at the office is no longer sufficient. Firms should reinvigorate their efforts to create their “how to” manual. What is the best way to get this done?
What’s My Motivation?
In any law firm different people have different roles to play. But what if someone were to get sick or need an extended absence? Do you have backup? For business continuity purposes a firm should have written documentation on how things get done. What if the person in your firm responsible for getting the bills out was not available? Is there someone else who knows how to do this? The process should be written down so that someone else could pick up this task if necessary.
When a new person starts at the firm, whether an attorney or support staff, a written policy and procedure manual can help them get up to speed quickly. Dedicating time to training often gets pushed to the side and the new hire is left to seek help or try to figure things out alone. Having a procedure manual allows for training and guidance when everyone else is too busy to help right away.
You know that there are likely many ways that your firm can improve how things get done, but identifying pain points and road blocks are harder to address when you may not be sure how people are doing things in the first place. By having documented standard operating procedures you can begin to review and streamline your efforts. For instance, how are engagement agreements handled? What triggers the need to send one? Who is responsible? Is the letter a template with variable clauses? Could you use information already entered into a practice management or time/billing system to fill in contact information with document assembly? Is the letter mailed? Could you instead email it through an electronic signature tool like Adobe Acrobat or Docusign to get it signed and returned? To improve your process it first needs to documented.
What Needs to Be Documented?
In short, everything your firm does should documented. Firm policies like time off, dress code, technology acceptable use and others are likely already in written form. However, there are procedures that go with these policies. How does someone request time off? Is there a master calendar to check? A policy and procedure manual can help the team stay in compliance with policies.
Your firm has many workflows. Are they documented? Workflows usually have a triggering event, followed by a series of actions. Examples include everything from responding to client requests, intake, billing, collections, mail processing, and records retention. What about opening a new client file? Closing one? Illustrating these workflows helps ensure consistency and compliance.
Are you leveraging checklists? Whether planning an estate, negotiating a contract or working on a real estate closing, a checklist can help make sure that the matter moves forward, and work is done in an organized fashion without anything falling through the cracks.
How Do We Get Started?
There are several ways to get started with your firm’s cookbook. You can have a team brainstorming session and ask everyone to submit what processes need documentation. You can ask everyone to think about what they do in a given week, month, quarter or year and if they are the only one who knows how to do it. For instance, who is responsible for paying the privilege license fees for the firm’s professionals every year? Would this requirement be in jeopardy of not happening if the person responsible took a sabbatical?
Once you have established your starting list of what goes into the cookbook, assign documenting the work to the person who does it most. It is probably best to have them record the process as they do it, which shouldn’t take a tremendous amount of extra time.
A firm procedure manual should be available to everyone in the firm. It can be stored on a shared file server or in the cloud. Make it easy to access. Make sure entries are dated so you can tell when the process was created and last updated. Consider who can make updates or edit processes. Assign task “owners” and make sure your documentation shows who created the process for questions. Add a Table of Contents or some easy way to navigate through the manual. Use bullets, screenshots, videos, and other easy ways to express complex information. Schedule a periodic review of the manual overall, but make sure that the process owner keeps the documentation as up to date as possible.
Tools to Get the Job Done
While you can create the “cookbook” in a shared Word/WordPerfect document or Google doc, there are many tools that may help with the capture and organization of the information and ease of use.
Mind mapping tools, like MindMeister and LucidChart, are freemium tools that let you create decision trees, document complex branching procedures, and flowcharts. A mind map could help document a workflow that has many “spokes” or is not linear.
There are also products purpose built to help document firm processes. Tools like Sweet Process and Process Street provide templates, sharing, and many options for getting a firm’s procedure manual created and updated.
You can also use tools you already have. Users of Microsoft 365 have a few options. The firm could leverage MS Teams to help with ongoing documentation. Create a team and then add channels to address workflows and procedures. Each channel can house discussion, files, “wikis” to keep processes updated, and project management templates in Planner based on best practice checklists (see this video tutorial to see some Teams features for law firms). Alternatively MS OneNote is a great tool to capture information, including checklists, video tutorials, screen shots, linked documents and more. And, of course, SharePoint.
To make capturing your firm’s knowledge easier you can use screenshots and screen recordings. There are great tools like Snagit. Snagit lets you create annotated screenshots and take video of your screen. Licensing is $50 per user (download), though for firms with multiple process owners you would need multiple licenses. Window 10 comes with a screen capture tool called “Snip and Sketch” (f/k/a the Snipping tool) and Mac users have Grab. Windows 10 users also have the Microsoft Steps Recorder, which will create a document that includes what someone did and a screen capture of the action.
Want to capture a video tutorial of how to do something? You could use a third party tool like Loom, but if you have Microsoft PowerPoint there is a screen capture tool built in. For Macs there are video capture tools built into the operating system.
Conclusion
Once you have documented your policies, procedures and processes you can begin to identify how to improve. You can feel comfortable knowing that your firm is prepared for onboarding and succession planning, as well as business continuity. You can begin to look at certain processes to leverage project management tools more effectively. The time it takes to create a firm cookbook is well worth the effort! To hear more about how tools like Sweet Process can help with your law practice management see this Learning Objectives webinar Top Ten Tools to Help You Survive and Thrive in Remote Work Environment featuring Lisa Angel from the Rosen Law Firm.